Ifefe is a hill situated in the Matopos National Park.  The Ndebele word refers to one of our most beautiful birds: the Lilac-breasted Roller or “blue jay.”  According to Sir Robert Tredgold, the name is “probably a reference to the colouration of the hill.” The story goes that Mzilikazi, first king of the Amandebele, was the only one allowed to use the feathers of this bird for titivation; consequently it is also known as Mzilikazi’s Roller.

Not to Ifefe, but to a smaller eminence nearby, known as Ifefe Encinyane (Little “blue jay”) do we go to experience transcendence.  We picnic in the late afternoon at a point with a 360 degree view of the horizon. The crystalline granite hill encrusted with yellow, orange and silver lichen, upon which we sit, is about two thousand million years old

We have the world to ourselves.  We are waiting for the moment when the setting sun meets the rising moon: their size is equal, their radiance is equal. The light of consciousness merges with the light of instinct.  We sip our wine on the threshold of time and eternity.  We are neither male nor female; we are perfection.  Like salt dolls walking into the ocean*, we lose ourselves together with the world.  The experience is beyond meaning.

*This analogy is Ramakrishna’s

When hell closes down for repairs, the devil goes to Beit Bridge for a holiday.  I think he has a timeshare on the old railway bridge; it’s government property, but when you’ve got contacts in high places, anything goes – for a song.  From this colonial relic he encourages the crocodiles to eat border jumpers.  He is in friendly competition with the Ministry of Home Affairs who is training selected crocodiles to become customs officers.  Why crocodiles? I asked one of the trainers: because they always have a welcoming smile for the tourists.

You can sense the devil approximately 60 kilometres, going south, from the border township.  Suddenly you are in cactus land: thousands of dreadful thorny eruptions, indigenous to hell (kaktos Beelzebabelaas), which makes T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land seem like a Disney theme park.  Then there is the ten year old detour, which reduces even off-road vehicles to instant rattletraps.  The new stretch of tarred road, shorter than the detour, is almost as bad.  When will Zimbabwean civil engineers learn that tarring a road is slightly more complicated than icing a cake?

That stench, which causes you to gag, and wind up your car windows, is the devil’s incense.  The rotting corpses of cows and donkeys, rammed into oblivion by Formula One juggernauts, are paving the way to the god of bad intentions.  You can’t miss him: he’s coloured red, he has a forked tail, a huge willy, and he carries a ZANU PF stroke MDC membership card.

The township itself is a masterpiece of incompletion: half-built shops, half-built restaurants, half-built garages, half-built intersections, half-built homes, half-built human beings.  But the worst place of all is the border post (and it’s now just as bad on the South African side).  From street kids specialising in hub caps to the very highest officials specialising in shifty wheeler-dealers, you will find yourself in a gallimaufry of criminal activity over which only the devil could preside.